Environmental, Social & Governance Briefs

For companies embarking on the practice of sustainability reporting it can be challenging to discern between the various reporting frameworks and guidelines. To ease this process, The Conference Board developed a table comparing some of the leading sustainability reporting frameworks.

For most businesses in China, including foreign firms, directly addressing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is unchartered territory. Many companies are still in the early stages of their sustainability journey in China, and existing programs often lack strategic intent or deep commitment. We see a tremendous opportunity for foreign firms to exploit areas of Chinese policy and SDG alignment to raise the impact and relevance of their sustainability programs in China.

The Conference Board has developed a sustainable procurement framework to help companies assess their sustainable procurement program’s orientation toward outcomes and impact.

There has been dramatic growth in ESG (Environmental, Sustainability and Governance) investing during the past 20 years – but along with this positive trend comes an equally dramatic rise in ESG reporting requirements, and a proliferation of rating agencies and assessment tools.

Embedding sustainability into the supply chain makes good business sense. Embracing sustainable procurement practices can help companies manage business risks, achieve costs savings through material efficiency gains, enhance their brand reputation, and manage suppliers more effectively. But success requires a focus on real-world impact rather than inputs and activities.

The cyber risk landscape is quickly evolving, but organizations are slow to catch up with the new threat landscape. Organizations are still organized to focus primarily on more traditional cyber risk management, are not updating their processes and policies or investing in tools and technologies to comprehensively address the latest and fastest-growing threats coming from digital and social media. Senior leadership and boards need to better understand the evolving cyber risk landscape.

Existing company disclosure practices provide the foundation to implement the TCFD’s recommendations Precedent in oil & gas shows reporting at the level of the four principles (governance, strategy, risk, metrics) can be done. Reporting on the 11 specific recommendations will be more challenging, however, none of these are impossible to meet. Climate change is a systemic issue and investors need system-level data. Which means data from all listed companies and eventually the large private ones.

Populism, nationalism, trade wars, March for Our Lives, and the #MeToo movements, among others, are reshaping how people, governments and nonprofits respond and interact with companies, and with each other. In a recent speech to corporate citizenship professionals in New Orleans, I painted a picture of how our crazy world impacting our roles as corporate philanthropists and responsibility practitioners, as internal and external stakeholders put more pressure on us to show value.